Category Archives: Hardware

Post navigation

In preparation for deploying more systems in Iceland this summer – I updated our spare Piksi Multis and did a garden test. It performed very well!

I set them up to fix at 10Hz but report every 5 readings – so its closer to our slow system in Iceland. The fix hopped around within about 1.5cm – which is good for my garden as the sky box is not that wide.

Today we set up two dGPS units to measure the speed of some of Fjallsjökull glacier. We chose an area of ice which is clearly moving forward towards the lake.

Here is the dGPS system setup on Fjallsjokull, with Jane Hart and Frey

The photo above shows a “quadpod” supporting the GPS units – which are an adaptation of those made by Matthew Roberts of the Icelandic met-office. The idea is to be strong enough to cope with winter and cast few shadows (which cause ice to grow). The system is currently measuring its position every 3hrs to an accuracy of about 2cm – using signals from the base station to help it.

the dGPS base station installed on a moraine close to the Fjallsjokull glacier. We used speaker stands burried in rocks to support the GPS antenna (top) and hold its 2.4GHz radio antenna (white stick). Shortly after this photo I accidentally kicked sand into the laptop keyboard – so it was not so easy to use after that!

View of Fjallsjokull with our deployement being almost in the middle of this photo.

Here you can see the new shape of the 2013 base station – without wind generator (extra solar panels instead), new panel Wifi antenna on the top, new camera just below that and Topcon dGPS on the very top now. The structure has been reinforced with recovered parts from the damaged and decommissioned GPS pyramid.

Here Phil is installing a new Wifi link to the moraine smart-camera system. Incredibly this “cantenna” can link directly to the Holmur Wifi 16km away! We don’t expect perfect connectivity but even occasional link-up will push the images to the web server in the UK.

For the last few years we have seen more and more of the lead for the 2008 wired probe be exposed due to surface melt. We were hoping that this year for the first time in Iceland we’d be able to recover it. When we arrived this year we found the lead going into a stream on the surface of the glacier, and with a bit of wiggling Graeme (shown below) was able to extract the probe.

Graeme with a wired probe from 2008 which has been recovered.

We’re looking forward to being able to open it up and see how well it has survived.